


thorn of crowns

by viviandarkbloom



Category: Collateral (TV 2018), Happy Valley (TV)
Genre: Crossover, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2019-11-19 15:05:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18137327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: A cold winter, a few pints here and there, smoking, swearing, tea, a disgraced priest on the run, a lonely woman questioning everything she believes in, and one hell of a gloriously screwed-up police sergeant. Hijinks, and probably sex, ensue. Jesus, take the wheel.





	1. will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?

One should never judge people on the quality of their tea alone.

 

Sitting in the bishop’s office, Jane Oliver reminds herself of this with a kind of prim vigilance, knowing that violation of this simple self-imposed rule will unleash a floodgate of raucous negativity in her mind. While she has gotten awfully good at overriding a host of compulsions toward knee-jerk opinions and ruthless biases and accepting, with God’s love, a wide range of troubled behaviors from addicts, molesters, murderers, she is not perfect. Because when something as beautifully simple as the comforting balm of good tea gets fucked up, and it shouldn’t get fucked up because it is bloody simple to do, it strikes at the very core of her too-English soul.

 

On this blustery gray winter day the bishop’s secretary had, in a terse 30-second mumble of a phone call, requested her presence here at barely seven in the morning. And now the same woman solicitously pours out a cup for Jane while offering not the expected pairing of a biscuit or a scone, but instead an unabashedly embarrassed look. Jane assumes this is because she is the bishopric’s rebel, the shameless reprobate, and the secretary must surely already know her fate: she will either be defrocked or sent to some obscure and remote location in Africa or Asia or, God help her, America. She tries not to think about anything and stares vacantly out the large window overlooking the dormant garden outside. Then admires the warm, ancient cup in her hand—chipped, adorned with pansies, its curved edges so thinned and beveled by time and use that if not careful the drinker could cut a lip, and she knows from past experience it holds tea possessing a faux-smoky bitterness masquerading as strength, its surface clarity spiraling down into murky, unappealing depth. Sort of like the bishop himself.

 

Sweat needles the back of her neck; despite the cold outside, the office roasts like hell. Speaking of hell, she thinks, there it is: her thoughts unleashed, a cerebral Cerberus roams her mind and only the intensity of quick prayers—God, help me contain this—distract and assuage. Doubt sets in. Doubt is always part and parcel of the vocation; if God cannot stand up to scrutiny, she is not worthy of belief.

 

When Rufus makes his entrance, he smiles, shakes her hand, and takes a moment to strike a pose with his back to her in front of the garden window—or perhaps he composes himself to deliver awful news, she allows charitably. Regardless, it’s a move that, he must surely know, does not impress.

 

“O troubled child,” he sighs heavily.

 

Jane straightens in the chair. Part of delivering a sermon is, of course, showmanship. The lingering pauses, the regretful sighs, all the emotional notes hit properly as in a sacred hymn. Rufus’s longtime gentleman companion probably helps in that respect; he’s a well-known theater buff with a hand in any number of Am Dram productions around the city. But the theatricality of the pulpit is not part of the job she usually enjoys; she feels conspicuous in front of a group, and usually works at her best in informal settings, or one-on-one.

 

“I’m not a child,” Jane says pointedly. But as she crosses her legs, realizes it might have been an ill-conceived move to wear the usual outfit of jeans and Converses to a formal meeting that will decide her future within the church.

 

“Yes. But—you understand why you are here today? And what must be done?”

 

“I do, yes. But Rufus, if you’re shipping me to outer Mongolia or wherever, just tell me, yeah? I don’t need pontification. I saw the papers.” She frowns. “Just like everyone else did.”

 

With no small amount of relish, Rufus recites the _Daily Mail_ ’s headline: “’Lesbian Vicar’s Drug-Addicted Girlfriend Caught in Murder Investigation.’”

 

“I was disappointed they didn’t work ‘illegal immigrant’ in there somehow, but I can see how that might’ve been too unwieldy a headline—a bit too much, all that.”

 

“If it were only that,” he retorts. “You made an obscene gesture at a photographer.”

 

“I flipped him off because I didn’t fancy being photographed at that particular moment. My hair was a bit of a mess that day. Ran out of conditioner.”

 

As if auditioning for the role of Lady Bracknell, Rufus unfurls a particularly melodramatic, long-suffering sigh. She wonders if he and the boyfriend recently saw a production of _The Importance of Being Earnest_.

 

“I know you think I’m not taking this seriously,” Jane says quietly. “But I am, so just tell me now. Why I’m here.”

 

“The archbishop of York has asked our diocese for assistance in a troublesome matter.” Rufus plops down so heavily in an overstuffed leather chair that it exhales wearily underneath him. “There is a parish in West Yorkshire that is, ah, a bit in limbo, shall we say.”

 

“How so?”

 

“Until recently they were under the care of a Reverend Frank Peverell. Reverend Peverell, however, has recently been under investigation by the police. No charges filed, but he is suspected of—” Rufus squirms, then spews it out in a shameful rush of words: “—abuse of four boys under the age of 15.”

 

“So he’s been dismissed?”

 

“Not quite.”

 

For fuck’s sake, she thinks, and winces under the hair shirt of prickling sweat along the back of her neck. At times she wonders who perpetuates the most evil, who wreaks the most damage: the abusers, or those that protect them. “What do you mean, ‘not quite’?”

 

“He’s done a runner. No one knows where he is.”

 

“Likely soaking up sun in Ibiza?”

 

“The police don’t think he’s left the area. At any rate, the diocese desperately need someone to take over his parish and act as a representative of the church in this—matter.”

 

“A representative?”

 

“We need to be informed of what actions the authorities are taking, to be kept abreast of the course of the investigation.” Seeing that she is about to protest quite loudly, he raises a silencing hand. “Just an inquiry or two, that’s all.”

 

“Does the archbishop _not_ have lawyers for all that?” Jane says incredulously.

 

“Obviously, it hasn’t reached that stage. We need a point person, one who possesses the utmost tact and discretion—”

 

“Yeah, that’s me all right, with my face splashed all over the media. I think I was trending on Twitter last week.”

 

“Perhaps in the North they don’t follow the Twitter. You are infamous here, but up there, less so. And I know you are capable of it—discretion, that is.” He accuses gently: “You spent _years_ being discrete.”

 

That much is true. Prior to recent events, her romantic life possessed a subterranean element; it was a mosaic of serial monogamy that resembled a map of the Tube, and she was a traveler moving silently station to station.

 

As it all hits her, she goes back to staring out the window. A thin layer of snow encrusts the bare trees, the molted shrubs. “So you’re sending me to West Yorkshire. In the middle of winter.”

 

“Do look at it in a better light, Jane,” Rufus snaps peevishly. “It’s beautiful country up there. Most importantly, it’s a second chance.” He softens his tone. “I am aware of your gifts, your talent, your work ethic. You have done much good here, there’s no denying it. And there’s no reason to think you wouldn’t do any less in a new parish.”

 

Jane laughs and he stares.

 

“’Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’” She shakes her head, enjoys the glory and relief of defeat because in that, she most clearly belongs to God and nothing or no one else. Rufus’s bulk, under the fine vestments, shifts nervously as he takes in the reference. “Henry II only had one troublesome priest to fret over,” she says. “But you?”

 

He says nothing and she keeps laughing—because it makes him uncomfortable, because she’s going to be even more of a cog in an infernal system that she’s been questioning with rising intensity over the past few years, because it’s better than crying.

 

It is, however, not better than swearing: “Well, fuck.”

 

“That’s not quite the note I wanted to end on,” he says.


	2. no cities to love

“Forty-eight years old and you still live like a uni student,” David says wryly. It is clearly meant as a jibe, but Jane thinks she detects a note of envy in his voice.

 

She scratches her neck. “Like you’re a role model of stability.”

 

They stand together outside her church—no, not hers, not anymore—staring into the rental van that contains a life’s belongings: clothes, kitchenware, a beautiful copper teapot her mother gave her years ago and that she’s always been too afraid to use, and too many books. While clearing out and packing up the bedroom she found clothes that Linh had left behind: t-shirts, leggings, a pair of shiny black Doc Martens boots. Since moving out, Linh returns neither texts nor calls; Jane has no idea where she lives now. She doesn’t come to the soup kitchen anymore. No one has seen her. So after sobbing into one t-shirt for fifteen minutes, Jane pulled herself together and offered the clothes to one of the new girls who worked in the kitchen. However, she kept the Docs because they fit her well and, like some frivolously minor sybaritic character in _Game of Thrones—_ she hates that Linh made her read one of those damned books—she dreads the winter of the North.

 

David scowls. “I’m sorry.” She almost believes him. “I’m just— _angry_ about it all. You didn’t tell me.”

 

“I told you yesterday.”

 

“Fucking hell, Jane. You know what I mean.”

 

“I didn’t want you to make a thing out of it.”

 

“How would I have—”

 

“Storming Westminster Abbey, holding a press conference, spray-painting Rufus’s BMW—”

 

“All wonderful ideas. That twat bishop needs to be held accountable.”

 

“It could have been worse.” She shakes her head. “I’ve had the sword of Damocles over my head here for far too long. A change of scenery could be good. I can still do good things in a smaller sphere than London, you know? It doesn’t have to be here.”

 

David smirks. “When was the last time you were out of London?”

 

She has to think about it. For at least a minute. He laughs. “No, wait,” she says. “I was at a conference in Cambridge, um, five?—right, five—years ago.”

 

“O great native Londoner, you are in for a shock.”

 

They continue the dumbstruck staring contest at the contents of the van. It’s not that she cannot bear to look at him. Rather, she worries her eyes would stray from his presence to catch a glimpse of the park she has walked past for over a decade and the sway of the trees therein, the street corner where she first took Linh’s hand and blurted out a confession that changed everything, the corner shop where she bought tea and digestives and tampons, the familiar skyline above her block of London with its sunrises and sunsets and moon phases and rain and snow and she if she cannot really love anyone or anything as much as God, can she love another place as much as this street, this city? Are there other places—other people—to love?

 

She is quietly amazed that he—the great man of state with so many responsibilities, with every minute of his day so meticulously planned—takes the time for such a meandering goodbye, to stand there for one long, quiet moment to construct a true and proper farewell. Gently, he squeezes her hand. He is an actor on a very visible stage—not unlike Rufus—a public servant trained to say the right things and make the right gestures, so perhaps he senses intuitively that this is a fitting ending to their story.

 

But he is also David Mars, a full-on emotional mess given to blather at the most inopportune times, including this one: “Do you know,” he says with a ridiculous amount of gleeful amazement, “there are _a lot_ of lesbians in Hebden Bridge?”

 


	3. the diary of a country priest

**_Friday morning_ **

Myra Preston, churchwarden extraordinaire, takes in the short woman standing before her with the myopic suspicion of someone suffering from not only terrible astigmatism but also a lifetime of sharing a Christian name with one of the country’s most notorious serial killers, even though she was named after a beloved great-aunt who happily went through a bottle of sherry every week.

“ _You’re_ the new vicar?” Helplessly Myra adjusts her glasses.

Should not have worn the Doc Martens, Jane thinks. She nods. “I am.”

“They didn’t tell us you were coming!”

Thus it comes to pass that Jane’s first act as vicar in her new parish is helping Myra retrieve her email password and check her account for the first time in nearly two months. She suspects that the only notification the church received about her appointment was sent via email because Rufus is both passive-aggressive and erroneously considers himself tech-savvy, and Myra cannot be bothered with the computer because the screen gives her a headache and she has carpal tunnel too—as proof of the latter affliction, she waves a bandaged wrist in Jane’s face.

“They didn’t tell us you were coming,” Myra says for perhaps the sixth time in the twenty minutes they have known one another, and as she sits in front of the ancient terminal while awkwardly maneuvering the mouse with her left hand. “It’s just not proper. Why not ring us? Send a letter?” Myra leans into the screen. “Agnes Masham died? I wondered why I didn’t see her at book club—oh wait, is this the one? From your people?”

Leaning over Myra's shoulder, Jane spots the email address of Rufus’s secretary. “I believe so.”

A click and the email, stuffed with attachments, unfurls slowly before them. There is a photo, of course, for verification of identity, just in case some rando off the street decides to step in and pretend to be a short, middle-aged lesbian vicar. Jane shakes her head. This particular picture is about dozen years old, taken shortly before Rufus entrusted her with the London parish; her hair was boyishly short then and he had prevailed upon her to grow it out “for obvious reasons.” In other words, she looked too dykey. Seeing the photo now, after so many years, she thinks of cutting her hair again because fuck it, it’s tiresome to pretend, and what has it all gained her anyway except a broken and bleeding fucking heart and exile from her home to a cold place where she knows no one? But perhaps that along with the Doc Martens might prove too much a test of tolerance for the likes of Myra and her Northern brethren.

Myra, however, coos approvingly. “Well now, that’s a very nice photo of you, love.”

“Thank you, Myra.” Jane is pleasantly taken aback.

“You look just like me grandson, Toby.”

Later, Myra shows her a picture of Toby. The resemblance is somewhat disconcerting.

**_Friday afternoon_ **

She is to live in a terrace house at the end of a lane, not far from the church. An old pensioner who passed away last year left the property to the diocese. Myra had answered the unsaid and worrisome question writ on Jane’s face with assurance that her reviled predecessor did not sully the house with his presence; Frank Peverell lived in a swank flat in “the toff part of town” and wherever that is, Jane has yet to encounter it.

At first the house feels too large, then she realizes this is because it is completely empty—except for an old sofa left in a living room. Still, she has barely possessions enough to fill up the downstairs. Upstairs, there is no bed. She did not think to bring a bed. Purchasing one goes on a lengthy mental to-do list where the task of visiting the police about Peverell ranks dead last.

After a couple hours of unpacking, she discovers another thing lacking in the house: heat. In a mobile call, she seeks Myra’s guidance on the matter.

“Oh, aye. The boiler’s broken,” Myra confirms.

“Can it be fixed?”

“I’ll call our Roy. He’s the boiler man.”

“Great, thanks so much.”

“I’ll tell him to put a rush on it. I’m sure he’ll be there first thing Monday morning.”

“Monday morning.”

“Aye.”

Jane stares at the old, hard snow layering the dead garden outside, at the barren landscape. In Yorkshire for one day and already it’s trying to kill me, she thinks. “It’s supposed to get down to, what? Four degrees tonight?”

“You’ve got fireplace,” Myra says defensively. _Suck it up, Southerner._

“Right. Well, if I don’t show up tomorrow for service, it means I’m dead.”

“Oooh, Rev, with acting like that you should be on Corrie!”

**_Saturday morning_ **

After surviving a night of sleeping on a lumpy sofa swaddled in blankets and fully clothed in front of a gas fireplace, a sense of accomplishment is short-lived; in the bathroom, as she hurriedly washes her face with cold water, the crisp, merciless Northern light streaming in from a curtain-free window catches glints of gray hair that, she thinks, were not present the last time she looked in a mirror.

Later, while making tea in the kitchen, she notices that the window affords an expansive view of the valley. The blue and white morning sky emerges from the cracked-open chasm of the countryside, the hand of God cradles the day.

**_Sunday morning_ **

About an hour before communion Myra and her sister, Penny—a mini-Myra sans glasses—show up at Jane’s door with Thermoses of tea and a tray packed with teacakes and scones.

“As we live and breathe, so do you!” Myra says.

With unabashed curiosity Penny roams the house—the scant interior truly desolate and depressing in the light of day—and tightly hugs herself, shivering ferociously despite the bulky parka she wears. “Jesus Christ, it’s cold in here.”

“Language, Penny!”

“Jesus would certainly agree,” Jane says.

“Too right,” Penny says. “He were always dressed for Club Med, weren’t he?”

**_Monday morning_ **

Jane waits for Roy the boiler man to show in front of the house, because it actually feels warmer outside than inside. A permanent chill has seeped into her bones, so periodically she hops up and down for warmth, pogoing around the pavement with such abandon that the neighbors may have already determined that the new vicar is a nutter. But the sun is out and the Docs have a pleasant, comfy bounce to them, not to mention they add about an inch to her height— _why have I never gotten a pair of these before? Oh right, too dykey, well fuck you, Rufus_ —she gradually creeps toward a good mood, a tenuous state of hopefulness. Then the mobile in her coat pocket vibrates.

It’s a series of texts from David. A month ago, to put her mind at ease, he had offered to help track down Linh via the services of a detective he had on retainer—someone he had hired to dig up more dirt on his ex for an impending custody battle because, all threats and posturing to the contrary, Karen was never going to change for the better. Hand shaking from cold and anticipation, Jane scrolls through and reads:

_She's living in a squat in Bethnal Green, bunch of club kids took over an abandoned nhs building_

_I think they are all mates of hers? one of them is this bloke who’s a DJ and says he knows Idris Elba. Do you believe this shit?_

_Anyway she seems ok and she’s working too, in a cafeteria at a school for the deaf._

There is a photo, presumably snapped on the sly by the detective. She is not certain if its inclusion is part of David’s quasi-philosophical tough love approach (as evinced in many of his bloviating speeches: _Just because I’m tough on England, doesn’t mean I don’t love this country!_ ) or if he is merely clueless as usual, but the photo shows Linh crossing a street with a young woman with feathered, chartreuse-tipped hair who carries a skateboard. Linh smiles and even though she is not kissing this girl or holding hands with her, Jane can tell by the way they lean into each other it’s more than casual friendship.

I have been thrown over for a skateboarder, she thinks.

So absorbed is she in staring at the photo, this casually crushing proof that truly confirms the end of the relationship, that she does not notice the rather large man with a Carhartt logo on his barrel chest who stands in front of her and tentatively says, “You the vicar?”

She jumps, drops the mobile, and gasps out, “Shit!”

“Sorry, love, didn’t mean to startle.” He grins. “I’m Roy.”

She wants to cry. _Roy, I am bereft._ But spontaneous confession never works well with laypeople. Instead, she forces a smile. “Here for the boiler, then.”

“Aye. No worries,” he assures with a wink. “We’ll warm you up right quick.”

It is far too early in the morning for heterosexual flirting.


	4. annunciation

Weeks later, Peverell gets bumped up her to-do list by the Bishop of Leeds. She is summoned to tea with the Bishop and, despite having the foresight to wear a dress and arrange her hair into something approximating a respectable bun, is coolly reminded of her duty in the matter. On the plus side, he appears to have no issue with her sexuality because he spends a good ten minutes of the meeting trying to set her up with his female cousin, who is a landscape gardener and plays for a local rugby club.

The next day, she puts it off as long as she can. Four o’clock rolls around and the daylong rain that has washed away most of the snow has finally subsided. She decides to risk the fifteen-minute walk to the precinct. The winter sky is blue-black and everything outside possesses a dark crystalline sheen, a craquelure of mixed surfaces and textures threatening disintegration whenever the wind kicks up. The headlamps of passing cars paint bright parallel strokes along the wet road.

Outside the precinct she hesitates but a moment. Then the door bursts open and a force of nature rages by, stronger than rain, more compelling than night: A tall woman in a uniform who moves with commanding speed, her face a mask of righteous anger. The light over the door fuses a two-second nimbus over her blonde head as she swaggers wary and quick past Jane. It’s hard not to swagger with all that weight on your hips; this Jane recalls from a brief liaison with a copper (Eleanor, ten years younger, amazing body heat, well, amazing body, really, and who broke it off because “it’s just too weird to date a vicar”).

The woman is power and light. She moves like a warrior, a woman who’s seen too much, who still has blood on her blade. Jane watches the avenging angel stalk down the street, turn a corner, and disappear from sight. On the off chance that the woman might somehow return, she stands rooted to the spot for nearly a minute.

It is, Jane knows, a lot to pin on so fleeting a glimpse. These days she questions so many things. The roles of choice and chance in the perpetuity of evil, both within the church and society. Her own choices about love and pursuit and doing good. The one thing she knows and recognizes without question is power. And the woman who just passed by her has it.

Finally she commits to pulling open the door and, once inside, narrowly avoids plowing into a cluster of uniforms and neon vests worn by three young coppers who appear to be arguing amongst themselves.

“—know better than to wind up Brunhilde like that!” This violently hissed fragment comes from the only male in the group. The young woman he berates only shrugs resignedly, as if winding up Brunhilde—Jane can only assume the angel stomping through the street is one and the same—is as avoidable as drawing breath.

Then their collective gaze then turns on Jane, and she gets that very particular, narrow-eyed law-enforcement onceover, traveling upward from the tips of her Docs to the white square of her collar.

She clears her throat. “Excuse me. I’m looking for DCI Mike Taylor?”

With an eye roll at her colleagues, the chastised young female officer takes her to Taylor’s office, where they find its occupant loosening a tie in anticipation of the five o'clock hour.

After the niceties of introductions and handshakes and offers of tea, Taylor sprawls in a chair as if they’ve known each other for years—or as if he has been expecting her. “So you’re Peverell’s successor, then. Kind of rough, innit? Like being the new kid in school where you get volunteered for washing blackboards or blamed for all the shite the cool kids do.”

Jane hesitates, wondering if she should point out that he is unintentionally comparing an accused child molester to being the most popular kid in class. “Sounds like your education was very interesting,” she says, which, judging from his stony expression, scarcely seems better.    

He goes into official mode. “What is the nature of your visit, Reverend Oliver?”

“As a representative of this parish, it’s my responsibility to keep the Bishop of York and his offices informed of any developments in the investigation.”

After a long beat, the professional façade drops and Taylor groans. “That it? Usually your lot go on and on, prose as colorful as your vestments.”

“I believe in sticking to the point.”

“Nice change of pace. I’ll do you one better. Here’s your update: Peverell’s still in the wind. Have no bloody idea where he is.”

“In the most recent report your office submitted to the diocese, it was believed he was staying at a farmhouse near Skipton. There were sightings of him in the village nearby.”

Taylor shifts his jaw.

“So—I assume that, uh, lead was followed up on?”

He glares at her.

“I’m just curious.”

“It was.”

“And he was not there?”

“He was.”

Jane tries to encourage by smiling politely. While she may not have an ounce of interest in men otherwise, she knows enough about them to successfully manipulate when she wants, within those crushing boundaries of gender norms. “And?”

“An altercation occurred and he escaped.”

“An altercation?”

“Aye.”

“Care to be more specific?”

Taylor shakes his head.

“DCI Taylor, you may be a champion of my brevity, but I’m afraid can’t return the compliment.” She taps the armchair nervously before proceeding with idle threats. “And might I add that the Bishop has a solicitor and if it is decided that future inquiries will be handled by him, well, I’ll pray for you because I met the man at tea the other day and he’s duller than a great thaw and quite capable of going on. And on. And on.”

Taylor pinches his brow. “I know the bloke you’re talking about.” He sighs and looks out the window. “All right. When I say ‘altercation’ I mean, ‘my sergeant went off and punched him in the face and as a result broke her hand.’ She thinks she broke his nose but can’t say for certain.”

 _Her._ Could it be the mysterious Brunhilde, the avenging angel? She must put aside the thought for now. “Is this how you conduct an interrogation, an serious inquiry into a very delicate matter?”

“Look,” he snaps, “just because you’ve got that dog collar around your neck don’t mean you can come in here pissing on my patch, all right? You think it’s so bloody easy to track him down and haul him in, you do it.”

“So you really have no idea where he went? And your sergeant doesn’t either?”

“I don’t, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t as well.” Jane opens her mouth to speak, but Taylor is on a roll: “But if she did know, she probably wouldn’t tell me, she’d just go there on off hours on her own, all by herself like the bloody idjit she is, and beat the living shite out of him, and likely I’d have to suspend her for the rest of her life but it would be oh-so-well-deserved and more of a punishment that your lot would ever inflict upon him.”

“I’m not here to protect him or offer him sanctuary.”

“So what would you do? If you stumbled upon him?”

“I would try to convince him to do the right thing, which is to turn himself in to the police.”

“Mercy me, a member of the clergy who wants to do the right thing.” Taylor laughs. “God save me from the do-gooders.”


	5. law and order: special parish unit

Within the main office of the parish house of the church is a tiny office designated for use solely by the vicar. With a barred window looking out into an alley, peeling green paint, an ornate wooden cross on a wall that looks as if it were made by a desperate lumberjack suffering from cabin fever and fearing death from ravenous wolves, and a heavy gray battleship of a desk with coffee rings interlocking on the desktop like an existential Venn diagram, the space radiates a funk of despair distilled from generations of sweat and wool and Old Testament rigor mortis. The first time she stepped foot in it, Jane did a 360 and promptly decreed that the empty table next to Myra’s desk outside this wretched space would serve just fine as her office. Despite Myra’s initial grumblings about the invasion of her office space (“it’s like bloody _Law and Order_ out here, us just sitting around together, like we should be solving murder of the week”) not to mention Jane’s cultivated eccentricities—half the time she sits on the table itself, cross-legged, gnawing on a pen—Myra appears to appreciate the company. It is, of course, also a good way to get quickly acquainted with the rhythm and the day-to-day life of the church, because Myra knows everyone and has been practically running the parish on her own since Peverell’s abrupt disappearance nearly two months ago.

A chilly Tuesday cursed with fresh snowfall— _when will this season fucking end?_ she asked God this morning and God, as usual, remained cagey on specifics—finds Jane sitting on the table-desk reviewing and brooding over bylaws for the parish school. Because of course there is a parish school, and of course there is a board of governors, and of course she has a place on the board, and of course she doesn’t know a damned thing about what she should be doing. Immigrants, rough sleepers, and addicts she understands; respectable board members like hedge-fund managers, lawyers, and real-estate agents less so. Blindly she gropes for a mug of tea nearby. When she raises it to her lips, she finds it empty.

Myra snatches it out of her hand and toddles over to the hot plate, which holds a pot of fresh tea. “Are you certain you don’t want us to stay late?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“It’s your first time with Toerags Anonymous,” Myra says. Every Tuesday evening the church hosts an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Jane, who has certification as an addiction counselor, had spoken with the chair of the meeting, requesting and then receiving permission to sit in and make herself available to the group.

 _Not like all that training and certification helped when you had an addict living in your home and sharing your bed._ She pinches the bridge of her nose, sighs, and chastises: “Myra.”

“I know, I know, but that lot is full of some real—you know—“

“No, I don’t.” As if issuing a challenge, Jane tosses the bylaws on the desk. “Full of what?”

“I don’t want to say—” Myra says primly.

Which is Jane’s cue to wind her up. She grins. “Wankers? Tossers? Shitheads? Dickheads?”

Myra, who takes great cathartic pleasure in Jane’s swearing, cackles freely. “Sometimes I wonder about that fancy seminary you went to!”

Barging in through the office’s side door, Penny arrives in time to catch the tail end of this and continues taking the piss: “Ooh la la, Cambridge!”

Jane shakes her head. “Never should have told you two—”

“She still banging on about being here alone tonight?” Penny says incredulously to her sister, and as if Jane is an unruly child not present in the room.

Myra grumbles in the affirmative. The phone rings. As Myra chats with a deliveryman who is bringing presumably fresh donuts and biscuits for the meeting tonight, Penny, grinning stupidly and with some obvious agenda barely under wraps, now hovers near Jane. Given that their last one-on-one conversation involved discussion of kangaroo filets in such great grisly detail that Jane briefly considered vegetarianism, she is not terribly optimistic about the content of this forthcoming exchange.

“So,” Penny begins. “What did you think of our Roy?”

Jane blinks. “I’m sorry?”

“Roy. He fixed your boiler.” Suggestively, Penny waggles her fuzzy eyebrows. “Nice lad, didn’t you think? Divorced, yes, and he has four kids, but—”

Dismally Jane realizes where this is headed: the dreaded but inevitable _let’s find the vicar a husband_ matchmaking session. Despite her dykey haircut at the start, it took nearly two years at the London parish for these efforts to dwindle down into nothing more than the obligatory and vague _so are you seeing anyone_ _special_ type of nosy parishioner question. “Oh. Yes. He seemed very nice, but I’m really not, ah, interested in starting any kind of relationship right now.”

“Don’t go on and tell me you’re married to the church, that stuff’s for the Catholics—“

Myra, who has rung off with the deliveryman, brings over Jane’s cup of tea along with a revelation for her sister: “Don’t be daft, Pen, the vicar likes the ladies.”

Indeed, it is a revelation for Jane as well, that she has been accurately outed by an elderly church lady, so much so that the scalding heat of the teacup against her palm takes a few seconds to properly register.

Myra, however, has a moment of doubt: “I did get that right, didn’t I?”

“Well, yes—”

“Ha! M’gaydar is _still_ cracker!”

“You have a gaydar?” Jane wonders aloud.

“Look at where we live, Rev. Can’t throw a marble without hitting a lesbian.”

Penny’s matchmaking brain undergoes recalibration. “So a _lady,_ then.”

“Like I said, I’m not really looking—”

“Pen, don’t even _think_ of Monica Tisdale! She’s seventy years old and reeks of maryjane! In fact, _she_ should be at this bloody toerag meeting!”

“ _Myra._ ”

Because Jane worries that Myra and Penny will promptly dash home and put her old photo on Tinder or some such—although she is admittedly a teeny bit curious how much she would pull—she relents and allows them to stay and help her prepare for the AA meeting. In the end, she appreciates the help. The group is not big, barely two-dozen attendants in all, but not having to worry much about setup frees her to greet and circulate just before the meeting.

She is accustomed to the provocations of the collar, to the mistrust and apprehension it elicits in the secular world. She has been kicked, threatened, mocked, derided, spat at, and cursed all because of it; the great irony that it has subsumed her sexuality and made her a visible target more than being queer ever has is not lost on her. But in this new world of her parish, her predecessor has set a course of such heightened mistrust that she has no idea how long it will take to undo his damage. If ever.

So despite her best efforts, when the meeting ends she is largely ignored as the group socializes among themselves. She lingers near a table laden with tea service, doughnuts, and biscuits. Cramming a large glazed doughnut in her mouth is the result not so much of eating her feelings—although there is an element of that—but rather that she is peckish beyond belief and hasn’t eaten since breakfast, which were leftover bangers and mash provided by Myra. This leads to the mad consideration of allowing Myra and Penny find her a wife. Or maybe just someone to bring her dinner every night and iron her clothes. And maybe sleep with on occasion? _Nope. All that sounds like a wife._

Putting aside all that traditional matrimonial-patriarchal tomfoolery, she wonders if she is ready to even casually date someone. To open herself up again to the possibility of love. Am I ready for that slippery slope? she asks herself—not minding that God might be listening in on this internal conversation as well. She is so absorbed in this tortuously meandering train of thought that she hasn’t noticed that there is a woman now standing next to her, casually dunking a teabag into hot water, and with a slight smile of slight mischief upon her face.

“So the shitstain’s really gone then, eh?” the woman says to Jane.

Caught off-guard, Jane cannot think of a witty retort and frankly cannot be arsed to defend the shitstain in question, so she merely allows her mouth to gape silently and her right eyebrow to go frantically twitchy.

“Sorry,” the woman says quickly. “Know that’s disrespectful, but all the same.” From under a fringe of long bangs she squints kindly at Jane. Her hair is halfheartedly tamed into a wild braid and she wears a tie-dyed shirt under a thick hoodie. When confronted with women of certain age wearing tie-dye, Jane automatically posits a multiple-choice question: _hippie or gay or both?_ But this woman showed up to the meeting tonight with a burly, bespectacled middle-aged man with the terse, anguished look of relapse cloaked over the defeated slope of his shoulders. While neither one spoke during the meeting, they clearly found solace in one another’s presence; Jane noticed that they held hands for almost the duration of the meeting.

“It’s all right,” Jane says. “I get it.” She smiles grimly. “Guilt by association.”

“I know your lot aren’t all like him.”

“No, but—” She hesitates, sighs. Rufus had said this could be a clean start; a fresh beginning for the reprobate. What he failed to take into account is her inability to keep her mouth shut. “The institution, the church, must bear the responsibility for the likes of—him. Nowadays we seem to fail in our most important missions.”

“Which are?”

“To provide comfort and guidance. To protect the weak and the vulnerable—and not exploit them.”

“Well.” The woman sips at her tea. “You’ve got your work cut out for you. Just the thought of him still being in the area sets a lot of folk on edge.” She pauses, looking for a reaction from Jane. “He just sort of—disappeared.” Jane, then, is not surprised at the next question. Because everyone from the bishop to the coppers wants to know: “Do you know what happened to him? Peverell?”

Frankly tired of the question herself, Jane responds crisply: “I don’t.”

“D’ya think they know and they’re not telling? The upper-ups in the church, I mean. Might be trying to keep him under wraps till they can figure out what to do with him.”

“I certainly hope that’s not true.”

“But you were just sayin’, weren’t you, the church has been falling down on th’ job as of late?”

Jane’s mouth curls into a rueful grin, and she is just about to say _touché_ when the woman’s boyfriend warily approaches.

“Clare?” His voice is tremulous, uncertain. Jane knows this type of addict very well: gentle, destroyed by demons, hobbled more than most by _the haul yourself up by the bootstraps_ myth that so pervades the world. “You ready?”

“Oh yeah, love. All set.” The woman smiles again at Jane and offers her hand. “So I’m Clare.”

“And I’m the shitstain’s replacement,” Jane replies.

Delighted at encountering the kindred soul of a wry nonconformist in this most unlikely of places, Clare grins. “Well, look at this way: There’s no place to go but up from that.”


	6. the true believers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey queens, today we are being REALLY highbrow b/c we are stealing from Ronald Firbank! Enjoy!

_i. the rainbow in the teacup_

For two seconds, the greasy film stretched across the surface of the teacup catches and distorts a rainbow. Jane yawns, stretches, and gives thanks to God for a moment of grace brazenly flouted in the aftermath of apparent defeat. Then a rumbling lorry outside ripples the liquid surface, she blinks into the winter light from the window, and it’s gone.

She is at the mission café at the behest of Clare, who sits forlornly across a table from her. They’ve been sitting together in silence for nearly five minutes. Based on what little she knows of Clare, she has easily come to the conclusion that the woman is naturally inclined toward the gift of gab in most situations. For the moment, however, Clare gently, wisely remains a handmaiden of Jane’s brooding silence for several crucial minutes as the latter slouches further into a chair and contemplates failure.

Finally Clare winces, squirms, and cannot take the quiet anymore. “He’s not going to do it, is he?” she blurts.

Jane smiles to soften the blow. “Probably not.”

“Shit.” Clare slumps, frowns into her tea. “Thanks. Thanks for trying, though.”

“Yeah. Of course.” Jane has spent nearly the last hour trying to convince a friend of Clare’s to enter a rehab program. He had been clean for years, started using again after losing his job six months ago, and showed up at the mission this morning thin and bedraggled, veins popped and bulging from telltale use. Claire knew enough of the addict’s life to know he was close to the end. Nonetheless, Jane had been surprised to get the call for help this morning, naturally assuming that Clare would seek assistance from others in her AA group and not the x-factor of a priest she’s known for barely a week.

The choice, however, becomes clear now as Clare leans forward in her seat. “You see,” she says, “his grandad was a vicar. And he, well, he always spoke fondly of the old man, only member of his family who didn’t treat him like complete shit, so I thought, you know, maybe he’d listen you, since you’re a vicar too.” Clare pauses, bows her head, and the opacity of the café’s oleaginous lighting thickens the sorrows and shadows of her face. “He always said he was a true believer,” she adds softly.

Jane nudges her teacup, feels as if she should say something affirming, but the words don’t come. I used to be better at this, she thinks. She has always excelled in advising and guiding parishioners one-on-one. _It’s a good thing you sell God and not drugs,_ David had once said to her. _Because we’d all be addicts under your spell._ Of course he’d said this while courting the delusion of romance between them; while her heart had not swelled as he had hoped, her head surely did.

Clare sighs and hugs herself. “Feel like I wasted your morning.”

Sitting up, Jane extracts herself from a self-pity party. “No, never. It’s—look, if he comes back, let me know, we’ll try again.” She rubs her cold, chapped hands and chastises herself for being a self-absorbed pillock. “Besides,” she groans and rolls her eyes, “we’re not exactly having a bloody rave back at the church this morning, so I’ve the time.”

Clare laughs. “Might get attendance up if you do that.”

“Don’t give me ideas.”

“It’s early days. I think people will come back once they realize he—Peverell—is gone for good. I mean, your, ah, bosses, they obviously have faith in you.”

“Why do you think that?” Finally, Jane sips the tea. She hopes Clare didn’t make it: It’s lukewarm and awful. She decides to wait for the rainbow to make another appearance.

“Myra mentioned this morning on phone that you live in old man Willoughby’s house. They must like you. I mean, I don’t know what it’s like inside, but that back garden is huge, it’s a dream.”

“Really? It’s nothing but weeds now.”

“The old man had an amazing garden back in th’ day,” Clare says. “I mean, it was really something. He had every kind of plant and flower and bush and shrub you could think of, just a riot of color everywhere, pride of the neighborhood. I remember when I was little, walking round to his place whenever I could, so I could just look at and count all the flowers and plants.” Clare pauses. “Then later, I were about 17, his wife died and he had this—breakdown, I guess you could say, he went a bit mental. He would sit outside on a lounger in the garden, wearing nothing but dressing gown, and flash himself at any girl walking by.” Abruptly she laughs.

Jane squints at her. Great, she thinks. There is no escaping the perverted ghosts of this town. “Yeah, that’s really—funny?”

Waving her hand, shaking her head, Clare continues: “No, it’s not that. So—one day a group of us are there walking by, and he does the thing, opens his robe, pretending it’s like an accident like he usually does. But this time he was in for it because my sister was with us. Blink of an eye, she’s scaling the fence of the garden and she gets in there and she’s chasing him ‘round and ‘round—I mean, _they literally circled a mulberry bush_ —she’s cursing her head off, he’s running for his life with old dangly bits flapping about, and _just, just_ as she’s about to grab him she trips over this potted begonia, and the bastard manages to get away from her and lock himself inside house. If she’d caught him, God knows what she would have done.” Her laughter fades.

Is this what Northern women are like? Jane wonders. “Sounds formidable—your sister.”

“Well,” Clare sighs, “that’s our Catherine for you.” The story concludes with this simple declarative sentence, freighted with such wealth of emotion and history that Jane couldn’t even begin to guess how to unpack it all. Clare takes a sip of the tea. “God, this is off. Sorry.”

“No worries.” Jane leans back in the chair. “Well, the space is wasted on me. I’m shit at gardening. Don’t have the patience.” She shrugs. “I had a friend who—well, she was good at it.” She trails off foolishly. Back in the London parish, Linh used to work in the church’s community garden; the labor of it seemed to give her more peace of mind and simple joy than being with Jane ever did.

“You need a plan,” Clare says. “I could help. We’ve had an allotment for a few years now, I’m not exactly a pro, but I know my way around a garden.”

“If the plan is for me to do absolutely nothing, I’m all for it.”

“Maybe we can come up with something low-maintenance for you. Is there anything planted back there now? D’ya know?”

Jane shrugs again. “Weeds. A trellis.”

“When it’s a bit warmer, I’ll come over and take a look. How’s that sound?”

“I’d happily pay you.”

“Like hell you will. It’ll be my pleasure. Been dying to get my hands in that dirt ever since the old man kicked off.”

When Jane returns to the parish half an hour later, she finds Myra doing what she does best: arguing with tradesmen, in this instance a carpenter who is supposed to be refurbishing some pews.

“Was just about to ring you,” Myra says. “Your board meeting is in an hour.”

“Thanks. Made it back in time, though.” She pours a cuppa, wades through a stack of mail, wonders why they are getting a lingerie catalog, briefly contemplates smuggling it home but throws on a mental hairshirt to abrade these pointlessly lascivious thoughts. The real thing is better, she reminds herself. Always better.

Myra breaks in upon her self-flagellation, such as it is. “You do know you’re barking up wrong tree with that one,” she says.

Jane arches an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware I was barking up any tree.”

“No?”

“If you’re talking about Clare, no.” Reluctantly she tosses the lingerie catalog in the recycling bin.

“Well. That’s good. Because—”

In one exasperated expression, Jane successfully encapsulates and conveys an entire train of thought to her trying colleague: _Did we not just have an entire conversation about calling people in crisis and need “toerags” and I quoted “judge not lest ye be judged” at you and you were like, “ok, you got me, good one, Rev.”_

“No, no,” Myra says impatiently. “It’s not that. I know Clare Cartwright. She’s got her problems but she’s a lovely, sweet person. I mean, even if she were, ah, interested, it wouldn’t be wise. Because her and that sister of hers are a package deal, and you don’t want to mess with the sister.”

“Why?”

“She’s a copper. But not exactly the run-of-the-mill kind.”

Jane grabs her tea and settles on top of her desk. “All right, go on, give me the intel. It’s nice to be on the other end of the gossip spectrum for once.”

“Well.” With relish, Myra glides away from her desk on the chariot of her wheeled office chair, a cherub in stretch denim and a pilled jumper delivering heavenly missives of utmost importance. “Let me tell you about Catherine Cawood.”

 

_ii. the flower beneath the foot_

Catherine watches the day disintegrate; the darkened evening sky fills in new, revelatory details in the form of supple shadows sacrificing themselves to the mind’s impositions.

Smoking, she sits on the step outside the house while Clare makes a great show of hopping around to demonstrate how freezing it is outside. Indeed, it is colder than a witch’s twat and Catherine’s arse is slowly going numb from contact with icy concrete but she’s not done with the cigarette, she’s not done twisting skeins of thoughts over and over in her mind, in vain hopes that something, anything will eventually unfurl into sense or solace. Pointless rumination— _obsessive thinking,_ the therapist she was forced to see loftily deemed it—is so part of her interior life now that it provides a deity-like comfort.

While driving back to the nick this afternoon after doing a house-to-house with Shaf, she saw a girl who looked exactly like Becky walking near the Town Gate in Heptonstall. In the years since Becky’s death, this is not an unusual occurrence; Catherine has never deluded herself into thinking that Becky did not look like the average Northern girl, so it stood to reason she would, on a regular basis, spot girls resembling her daughter. Ghosts, apparitions, gone in a flash and making her think she’s finally losing it. This one today, however, matched Becky’s hair color and style, her height and gait to such unnerving exactness that Catherine nearly rear-ended the pricey Audi in front of them in traffic, and prompted Shaf to grumble once again about the wisdom of having a woman with only one good hand—the hand she used to punch Peverell healing nicely but still wrapped up—driving a vehicle. She bitched at him, then apologized, and back at the nick spent the remainder of the day bitching and then apologizing at everyone she encountered. Only Joyce had the temerity to threaten her with a thorough cactus rogering, which actually did give them all a much-needed laugh.

So she’s not really paying attention anymore to what Clare is saying: “—sat and talked with Dom for nearly an hour, so I don’t think she’s ‘up to’ anything.”

Catherine’s mind circles back to the girl at Town Gate again. The shade of her child walks with her every day, sometimes visibly, sometimes not. Well-meaning people think this brings comfort. It does not. Remembers the vicar at Becky’s funeral saying as much. Remembers Richard’s hand digging into her arm as she screamed at the man, spitting at the poor old sod in his vestments. _Your God is shit, your God is nothing,_ she had screamed. Days later, in spiritual retribution as it were, she saw the first of the Becky doppelgangers and chased the poor girl half a block, scaring the shit out of her. If there is a God—she thought then, and thinks now—well, God is surely fucking with her.

Which brings her around again to the topic at hand: the new, friendly neighborhood priest who has been sticking her nose into the Peverell case. Mike had been reluctant to share any intel about the matter, largely because he was still furious at her for clocking the scrote in the first place and probably indirectly blamed her for the continued hassle of dealing with the bishopric. But she’d gotten the name of the vicar out of him and despite the usual, wearily perfunctory warnings to keep her distance, didn’t think it would hurt if Clare attempted a subtle interrogation and quiet character assessment of the woman in question. The only problem is Clare is sometimes as subtle as a sledgehammer and, not unlike her late friend Helen, always inclined to see the good in people.

“I didn’t ask you to become her personal bloody gardener,” Catherine sighs.

“No, I know. But honestly, I don’t think she’s a bad person. Don’t get that vibe from her. Don’t have that look about her.”

“Just because someone looks kind and sweet and innocent,” Catherine retorts, “doesn’t mean they are actually kind and sweet and innocent.”

Clare smirks. “Oh, so you think she looks kind and sweet and innocent?”

“I saw a photo, yeah, she looks as wholesome as a Labrador retriever.”

“Shit, Catherine. Did you PNC her?”

Loudly Catherine shushes her.

“Why? Just us chickens back here. Well, did you?”

“Yeah, I might have, and I found out some interesting details when I did: namely that she once had a girlfriend half her age with a drug problem who was a witness in a murder investigation so convoluted that I still don’t understand why it happened or who the hell did it, it all sound like the kind of crazy shit that only happens in London but putting all that aside, this lass was also an undocumented immigrant, so maybe we should really be asking ourselves what kind of person in a position of power starts up a relationship with a vulnerable young woman like that?”

Clare sags against a wall. “How old?”

“Twenty-three.”

“She were of age, then.”

“Yeah, well, if your Labrador vicar were a bloke you’d be looking askance at it, wouldn’t ya?”

Clare’s silence is confirmation, as is the switching of subjects: “Thought we were quitting smoking.”

Ever since she breathlessly chased John Wadsworth down a set of train tracks a couple years ago, Catherine toys periodically with the idea of stopping. Always she thinks that maybe, just maybe, if she hadn’t been so winded while talking with him and worrying that she would have a heart attack right then and there, she might have been more focused with him, might have actually thought of and said the right thing that would have brought him down. And recently Ryan had made noise about it being a “bad habit”— _Mrs. Beresford says it’s worse than nose-picking_ —so Clare had made it a thing: They would give up smoking together. It would be easier that way, she had said, they would support each other. So far the only mutual support they could supply came from burying their faces in biscuit boxes to subsume the craving for nicotine with that of sugar.

“I’m down to one a day,” Catherine mutters defensively.

“They gave her old man Willoughby’s house. Did you know?”

“No.”

As usual, Clare’s optimism resurfaces. “They must really like her. To give her that house.”

“It’s just another terrace house.”

“But all that space for the garden. You remember that garden, don’t ya?” Claire grins. “You chasing him around—”

“Yeah. Oh yeah.” She had been nineteen, almost twenty, just starting police training. She was young, strong, beautiful. She could have anyone she wanted, regardless of gender, and she did. Eventually she would settle down, of course—the practicality of her nature would lead her to choose Richard—and she would be a great detective. She would set the town to rights. At that time, however, she lived for the drinking, the fucking, the camaraderie, the adrenaline. Memory colors that day as red and white: she saw red, felt red pumping through her, seethed white-hot with rage as she chased that fucker around the garden—and then, ignoble defeat in the form of that bloody begonia. She twisted her ankle, skinned her knee, and, in a furor, she crushed the poor wounded flower under the worn sole of her Stan Smith Adidas.

“You know, to this day—“ Catherine rises and grinds the cigarette butt under her shoe.

Clare smiles and finishes their old joke. “—you can’t stand begonias.”

The remainder of the night is telly, storytime with Ryan, an attempt at sleep. At two in the morning she is still staring at the black canvas of the bedroom ceiling. She’s tempted to sneak downstairs and have a smoke on the sly. Her mobile vibrates. It’s a text from Ann— _you awake?_ —but she does not answer. The void of night is all she can handle right now.


	7. a bell through the night

Does God tell her to go to the pub?

Like many things having to do with God, it’s complicated. Crepuscular Friday evening seeps into the house, a death shroud over the gray winter week. Jane sprawls on the old sofa, watches the steady glow of the gas fireplace silently throb in disturbingly uniform undulations along the ceiling. A cup of tea and a book of Thomas Merton’s late journal writings sit ignored on the floor. This is not a radical departure from Friday nights past in London—at least in recent times, which usually took the form of meeting David for a drink or a quick dinner, listening to him bitch and moan about various romantic entanglements while struggling admirably to properly converse with her before a complete breakdown of the social contract where he would absentmindedly start scanning texts and taking phone calls, usually from reporters looking for a drunken and inappropriate quote from a garrulous, self-righteous politician. Then she would go home and wait for Linh to come in, wait to bridge a gap seemingly vast in nature between euphoria and despair, between the safety and sanctity of her own lucid, lovestruck reality to Linh’s inaccessible, ketamine-laced realm.

But now there was neither self-absorbed best friend nor self-destructive girlfriend. Just the question of going to the pub on a Friday night, like everyone else—a skeptical, trivial question not worthy of God, but nonetheless God has an opinion: _So don’t get shitfaced, Jane._ Because last time she got well and truly pissed whilst feeling sorry for herself she ended up in bed with David and subsequently spent months scraping herself raw in attempts to fit her square-pegged soul neatly into the deceptive well-roundedness of straight life, only to discover that this particular shade of societal acceptance, this denial of an essence within her, created a spiritual vacuum that she could not endure.

Earlier in the week she did a round of home visits with elderly residents, one of whom was the mother of a pub owner named Gerry. Grateful that someone would sit and read back issues of the _The Sun_ with his mum for an hour, Gerry granted her the gift of eternal free beer at his joint— _just beer, mind, no fancy cocktails_ —appropriate recompense for an afternoon of exposing her mind to _Sun_ stories about penis-eating crocodiles or Wayne Rooney’s threesome or the failed bum-lift scars of an aging reality TV star.

The other option, of course, involves finally checking out one of the local queer clubs. The mere thought of putting herself out there, however, releases a numbing, narcotic sluggishness through her limbs, and as she finally rouses herself from the couch she trips over the Merton book but blessedly misses booting the teacup.

So the dilemma of free lager or free lesbians appears resolved: Gerry’s pub is closer. Perhaps she could save mingling among her own kind for Saturday night, unless the wild temptation of Myra’s book club takes hold. Still, she hesitates at the coat rack because alongside her boring everyday duffle coat—an anomaly in the North because every woman she encounters wears a parka or a puffy coat resembling a luridly shaded bloated worm fit to burst—is an old motorcycle leather jacket unearthed a few days ago in the last unpacked box remaining from the move. The jacket is a sloughed-off skin of a past life. Fifteen, twenty years ago it served her well on the pull and even the faintest touch now brings back memories of clubs and women and sweat, the leather supple and warm under a stranger’s touch. Every weekend offered the promise of a different woman and the illusion of shameful lies masking her vocation— _I’m a teacher, I’m a secretary, I’m a chef_ —although on the last one she got pretty well rumbled the morning after when the woman she’d picked up the night before insisted on soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. She doesn’t regret the struggle of that time in her life; it was a necessary rebellion from the suffocation of the institution. But now she has been promiscuous and celibate and monogamous and straight and through it all seemingly no closer to love or God than when she blustered with furious idealism through seminary school.

And, after all this time and in her way, still questioning, still rebelling. She groans, grabs the duffle coat, pops the hood, and is out the door.

Gerry’s pub is called Crossed Keys. He is behind the bar when she arrives and happily sits out a free pint of ale. The crowd is firmly middle-aged and the range of music—nothing beyond the early 1990s—reflects that; the beginning pulse of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” brings to mind a childhood crush on Stevie Nicks. When she came out to her parents some twenty-five years, they were quite sanguine about it, largely because of this huge honking queer tell: _Of course you are, dear,_ her mother had said. _When you were twelve, your entire bedroom was plastered with photos of Stevie Bloody Nicks._

She chats for a while with Gerry, then a parishioner who spots her at the bar, all while gradually recovering the lost art of nursing a drink through an entire evening. After the parishioner wishes her good night, she is grateful for cultivating caution with alcohol. Because the blonde avenging angel that she saw outside the police station so many weeks ago, the woman anointed _Brunhilde_ by her colleagues, now sidles up to the bar and stands right beside her.

Not only that, but Brunhilde appears to know who she is: “Reverend Oliver, I believe?”

With the pint glass poised at her lips, Jane releases a startled _puh_ that propels a flight of foam into the air, plopping gracelessly onto the bar and almost on Brunhilde’s left hand—which is thickly bandaged to the wrist and with a lit cigarette jammed comically between two visible fingers, and that is when Jane makes the crucial connection and arrives at the moment of _duh_ : Of fucking course, Brunhilde is none other than Catherine Cawood—sister of Clare, bane of Mike Taylor’s existence, puncher of pedophiles, chaser of flashers, mother of a daughter who took her own life, police sergeant who risked her life to save a kidnapped woman, recipient of the Queen’s Police Medal, and occasional pilgrim to the _Rocky Horror Picture Show_ (noted film critic Myra Preston: “that movie is for degenerates, it is”) _._ So Jane’s mind reels thanks to Myra, who seemingly knows enough about Catherine to write an unauthorized biography, but the unnerving presence of this woman, head to toe in black and with mercilessly beautiful blue eyes, prompts her to down nearly half a bitter ale that she did not particularly care for.

Coolly amused, for the moment anyway, Catherine takes a moment to stare at the blob of beer foam on the bar.

With exaggerated care, Jane places the pint glass on the bar and attempts to regain her dignity; the dog collar always helps in these instances, even the time she tripped over a garden hose while performing an outdoor marriage ceremony. “Yes. I’m Reverend Oliver.”

“Thought I should introduce myself. I’m Catherine, Clare’s sister—you remember Clare, from the AA meetings at your church—hoping I’ve not violated some AA protocol here mentioning her by name—”

“You haven’t,” Jane interrupts softly.

“—right, well, Clare’s mentioned you, and I know you’ve heard about me—”

“A bit of an understatement, that.”

This catches Catherine off guard—her mouth gapes a smidge, her eyes narrow, and Jane relishes a strange pleasure in achieving this. “What?”

Before she can capitalize on this advantage, Gerry interrupts: “Catherine,” he snaps. He glares at the cigarette and sits a saucer on the bar.

“Oh. Sorry, Ger.” Catherine takes a quick final drag off the cigarette, scowling as she tries awkwardly to grind it out against the proffered saucer but, due to the immobility of her bandaged hand, fails miserably.

In long-suffering fashion he sighs, plucks the cigarette out of her hand, and extinguishes it. Jane notices that a posse of coppers, including the thin, dark, intense-looking young woman who led her to Mike Taylor’s office the other week, have commandeered a table in the back of the pub. Gerry—who, earlier, had been complaining about everyone under the age of thirty—has made wary note of this as well. “Special occasion?” he grunts at Catherine.

“Our Shaf is getting hitched, poor bastard,” Catherine says. “So I’m paying for first round, oh, and probably every round after, so set us up, will you?”

“Lovely.” Sighing, Gerry begins collecting pint glasses.

“So.” Jane nearly jumps as the full force of Catherine’s attention fixes upon her once more. Somehow, without even taking the slightest step closer, Catherine authoritatively fills the space between them, taking a lead before the conversation even begins, and not for the first time in her life and despite the lift of the Doc Martens, Jane curses her shortness. “Where were we?”

“Well.” Jane risks another sip of ale and an attempt at humor. “I get the distinct impression you were about to read me the riot act about _something_.”

Catherine, however, has moved on from idle chat and penitence over breaking a minor law about smoking indoors. Her mouth cups a polite smile, but her eyes are clear and focused on the task at hand: directing an interrogation, laying out the rules of her patch. “No, not really. But I’m aware that you have an interest in the Frank Peverell case.”

“I’m just the church’s liaison in the matter, that’s all.”

“Bit curious, innit, the church remaining so very interested in an investigation now outside their jurisdiction?”

“The Bishop merely wants to be kept abreast of developments in the case.”

“Developments. Such as—?”

“I think you know what the word means, Sergeant.” Jane kicks herself mentally. Getting stroppy and anti-authoritarian with a police officer knee-deep in this bloody investigation is not the smartest move. She clears her throat. “The bishopric hopes that by mutual cooperation and sharing of information we can bring about a successful resolution to this matter.”

The masterful recitation of such canned bullshit, however, makes Jane pray for forgiveness. Even though she thinks that Rufus would be proud of her.

Obviously Catherine knows it’s bullshit as well. “So.” How this woman can make a mere syllable reverberate with the ring of crossed swords is, Jane wonders, a marvel. “If we know where he is we should just—tell you? So you can swoop in and save him from prosecution? I hate to tell you, but this is really out of church’s hands now. The families of his victims have filed detailed depositions with investigators, it’s on record and known to the public, it’s a police matter now, and any interference in the case will be view as obstruction and will be pursued as such.”

“That sounds a _bit_ like a threat.”

“Oh no, not at all.” Another smile fails to reach Catherine’s eyes. “You’ve nothing to fear from me.” A rhythmic tap of the bar with her bandaged hand signals the end of the conversation. “Well. Goodnight, then.” She turns to walk away.

“Sergeant,” Jane calls—and is slightly taken aback at Catherine’s quick, authoritative pivot, a rapid, almost explosive movement paradoxically followed by the calm bearing of an attentive, focused listener taking in every detail around her with rapt precision. “If you think I have any kind of vested interest in protecting a man like Peverell, you’re wrong.”

“I know.” Lightly, Catherine bounces on the soles of her feet and hesitates before adding a benediction that, perhaps, she thinks Jane hasn’t quite earned: “Clare’s vouched for you.”

To the hue and cry of beer and matrimony, Catherine returns to her black-clad gang of coppers and an undertow of fascination tugs at Jane, faintly but assuredly disturbing because she knows all too well where it could lead. And it is the last fucking thing she needs right now.

Gerry’s laugh proves a blessed distraction. “Bloody hell,” he says admiringly. “Right off the bat, you’ve gotten in it with Catherine.” Jane opens her mouth to apologize, but he’s already sliding a fresh pint in front of her. “Daresay you’ve earned this one, Rev.”


	8. midnight is where the day begins

_i. leather jacket or mommy issues or both_

“I _love_ this song!” says the woman that Jane, whose sense of futility runs countercurrent to her ale-addled sex drive, is half-heartedly attempting to pick up.

It starts off promising, if only because the expectations in place for the enterprise—offering herself up as an aging but new signpost in unfamiliar territory and generating a munificent vibe of _I’m here, I’m queer, I’ll buy you a drink_ —are ridiculously low. Their eyes do not meet across the crowded room; rather, the woman plops next to her at the bar while rummaging through a large purse looking for a phone charger that she does not find. The woman is gorgeous and young—dark skin, thick black hair, glittering brown eyes, probably late 20s, sweetly flirtatious—and as Jane eagerly tallies up these surface-level positives she anxiously tries to pinpoint what makes _her_ attractive to this woman: leather jacket or mommy issues, leather jacket _and_ mommy issues? But quickly they discover a mutual appreciation of 90s-era club music and what prompts the woman’s outburst of approval, and triggers a massive nostalgia bout on Jane’s part, is a remix of U2’s “Lemon.” She heard it at one of the first gay pride events she ever attended, a good 25 years ago or so, where she was too shy and terrified to speak with anyone properly. But through the miracle of gin-and-tonic and what she was told was _your beautiful smile,_ she ended up making out with someone wearing a Man United tee in a toilet stall until a lovely but tripping and broken-hearted trans queen burst into the loo, crying and seeking solace among her sapphic sisters about a bloke who did her dirty. So Jane and her potential shag buddy, offering toilet paper and consolation, talked her down from stabbing him in the balls with a nail file.

 _You’re gonna be a great nun, Jean!_ had been the trans queen’s grateful parting words. Wrong on two counts but one could not expect complete accuracy on minute details from someone high and drunk and suffering the ignominy of raccoon eyes from crying all night over someone named Dougie. She had ended up going home alone that night and fully expects the same tonight, because she cannot be bothered any more for the pretense, for elaborate lies and denials. All the same, when the usual apprehension alights in the woman’s dark eyes at full disclosure of Jane’s vocation, she is disappointed.

Bewildered, the woman blinks and Jane cannot help but take notice of her lush eyelashes, decides to believe it’s nature’s doing and not something courtesy of a wand out of a tube. “You’re a priest?”

_And I feel_

“Yeah. A vicar.”

_Like I'm slowly, slowly, slowly slipping under_

“Really? Get the fuck out.” The woman winces. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Jane smiles broadly to put her at ease. “I swear all the fucking time.”

The woman laughs, albeit nervously. “It’s—wow.”

“Hmm.”

“it’s weird, isn’t it?”

_And I feel_

“Not for me.”

_Like I'm holding onto nothing_

“Yeah, don’t mean any offense, honest, just a bit weird for me. Thought you were a, you know, a professor of summat.”

“My parents were,” Jane offers, even though she thinks the woman couldn’t care less. Her mother and father had more or less expected her to follow the family path into academia. Although her mother was an infrequent but dutiful churchgoer, her father was the worst kind of cynical agnostic and saw her beliefs, her calling, as mere youthful infatuation. She cannot forget the day she announced over tea her intent to go into seminary; as her mother slid into shock and in all likelihood quietly blamed herself for teaching Jane church hymnals on the piano, her father slammed his fist on the table and stalked out of the room—allowing, as any proper Englishman does, for the resultant jarring and scraping of teacups to signify unimaginable emotional tragedy.

Gulping the bitter dregs of ale, Jane is about to call it a night when the woman, gnawing at her lower lip, leans in and offers a rousing hit of sweat, perfume, and cleavage that lifts her hopes a bit, even though she fears a suggestion of weird religious role-play might be in the offing—because it wouldn’t be the first time _that’s_ happened—and as the woman lays a hand atop hers Jane tries frantically, telepathically to convey _please please don’t be weird_ to her but the convenience and clarity of such silent communication, alas, only works with God.

“Can—can I tell you something?” the woman asks meekly.

_And these are the days_

“Sure.”

_When our work has come asunder_

“Something happened to me a while ago.” Then it comes out in a rush: “Actually, I did something that—I’ve never been able to forget.”

_And these are the days_

“Tell me,” Jane says.

_When we look for something other_

It’s another club confessional. In her hedonistic heyday, whenever she was honest enough to admit she was a priest, she usually ended up in a dark corner in some club or pub or bar listening to someone’s convoluted tale of sexual misconduct, petty revenge, or minor theft because the craving for absolution always runs neck to bloody neck with sex and desire. Tonight Jane hears a strange tale of sibling rivalry as the object of her dwindling attraction admits that when she was a teen, she replaced the toothpaste in a tube with Vagisil after a row with her sister, who as a result ended up in A&E getting her stomach pumped and, to this day, their entire family think it was her stoner wankpot brother who did it.

Absolution—and passive-aggressive chastisement—will no doubt serve the woman better than a one-off in a toilet stall or even back at Jane’s house, where seeing piles of books about God or religion or Thomas Merton or Thomas Aquinas—all the Thomases fit to read, as David once said—would probably freak her out all over again. Might as well keep a chainsaw, duct tape, and rope in my living room, Jane thinks.

Ten minutes later she is walking home alone in the cold night, wondering if she would have been better off going to Myra’s book club and/or allowing Penny to set her up with a 70-year-old pot-smoker. _Right again,_ she admits to God, _that was a bad idea._ She hopes that the leather jacket and the dark watch cap on her head, with her hair all tucked up underneath it, make her look menacing enough not to be bothered, that all the drunkards out and about tonight—and there are a fair few on the high street, shouting and laughing and arguing—will mistake her for some tiny bloke with anger management issues about his height who will rabidly fight anyone daring to look at him askance. It is not what it used to be: The exhilaration of nightlife, the euphoric adrenaline rush of music, being among her people, looking into a stranger’s eyes and seeing desire within them. All of it a mad chase for—what? Love? She had love; she lost it. Perhaps there is no rediscovery, only recovery. Perhaps there is nothing more but cups of tea and rereading Merton now, all the old habits of comfort now tasting of loneliness. Her and God in a drafty house in the great North.

Inside the leather jacket her mobile shimmies and she stops dead. The thought of Linh goes through her—even though she knows better, even though the mere conjuring of her name is no longer the magical, all-consuming rush of joy it used to be, but more the minor savagery of a paper cut on a fleshy, tender part of her hand.

Then she thinks it’s far too late for Myra’s book club to be going on, unless someone had really, really intense feelings about Ian McEwan.

 

 

_ii. the firmament of heaven_

The atrium of the hospital is all glass: Pretty by day, but ominous at night and leaving its scattered nocturnal occupants—a nurse at an entry desk, a janitor, an old man in a wheelchair and his son waiting for a ride home, a scared girl, and a tired vicar—exposed to the outside world like nerves in a shattered tooth.

“Do you want to borrow my jacket?” Jane says to the girl, who shivers.

The girl, named Jasmine, shakes her head. She is a chain-smoking eighteen-year-old with swaths of sleeplessness under her eyes. She moves slowly, hugs herself carefully due to a broken rib. A bottle of painkillers rattles around in the pocket of her thin hoodie.

Upon arrival in Hebden Bridge so many weeks ago, Jane had offered herself up as a volunteer at a local domestic abuse service, albeit not with motivations driven by God, charity, duty or anything remotely noble but rather the usual self-abnegating habit of spreading herself too thin and wanting to forget things she didn’t want to think about: like the state of the world and the lack of faith and belief therein, a shortage of oat milk at Tesco, or maybe, just maybe, a woman she loved and let go.

So the post-midnight phone call she receives on her walk home is from the very same agency that she had completely forgotten about. Her mission, as so frequently is the case, is to sit, be present, and offer the most passive and peaceful form of protection: She is to wait with Jasmine for a transport from the agency, which will take her to a refuge accommodation in Burnley. Even though she can tell straightaway that a short, middle-aged woman in a leather jacket does not inspire a hell of a lot of confidence in Jasmine.

Jane holds in a sigh, removes the cap from her head and as she does so, realizes it is yet another damned article of clothing left behind by Linh. Sometimes she wonders if Linh intended on coming back because she left behind so many little things that could be interpreted as signs, as breadcrumbs—no. More likely, she was so intently focused on getting the hell out of Jane’s house and life that she did a tremendously shit job of packing. Has Linh ever gone back to the parish since she left London? Even out of the idlest form of curiosity?

She notices that Jasmine is eyeing the watch cap. Jane offers it. “Here. It’s plenty warm.” She smiles as the girls slides the cap over peroxide blonde hair. “You can keep it.”

“Really?”

 _She’s not calling, she’s not coming back._ “Yeah. Really.”

“Thanks.” Jasmine shakily returns the smile. This small act prompts a smattering of faith in Jane, at least as someone she can talk to. “You—you think he called police? The doctor?”

Jane did not speak with the A&E doctor, only caught glimpses of white coat, furrowed eyebrows, harried scowl; she was too focused on following the instructions from the agency to get Jasmine out of the A&E and to the hospital’s main entry area for a safe and quick pickup. She hesitates. “Possibly.”

“I don’t want no fucking police.” It had been the first thing the girl—bristling with fear, wincing with pain—had said to Jane when she showed up: _No fucking police._

“I know,” Jane replies. “But doctors are required to contact law enforcement if they suspect domestic abuse.” For any doctor or nurse with half a mind, everything about a tense, frightened girl with a broken rib would raise red flags.

“Fuck.”

“We don’t know that he contacted anyone.” _You are so good at providing useless comfort._ This chastisement originates not from God but from herself. “But your ride should be here right soon.”

Jasmine says nothing, but gulps desperately at the cup of tea provided by Jane via vending machine.

In the ghostly intaglio of the atrium’s glass wall Jane sees the two of them engraved into night. If not for God she would, perhaps, find bleakness in a tableau of two women isolated and framed in darkness, this perfect rendition of universal indifference. Despite everything, including aching doubts that recur far more than she would like, she still possesses belief and in the glass reflection finds the firmament of heaven.

Mysteriously enough, she also finds herself thinking of Catherine Cawood. Does she believe in God? And if not, what does she believe in?

In polytheistic cultures, there is always a trickster among the deities. But her God, the one true being, possesses dazzling multivalence. It took her a while to figure out that God’s sense of humor was not cruelly capricious but limned with purpose. In other words, God likes to keep her on her toes. Because no sooner does she think of Catherine Cawood than a splash of a bright yellow in the form of a bulky neon vest stipples the glass reflection, and the person filling out said vest is Catherine.

As Catherine saunters over to them, she removes a peaked cap and impatiently rufflles a fringe of flattened blonde hair across her brow—and with her left hand, which is no longer heavily bandaged but still faintly bruised.

Even as her kneejerk anti-authoritarianism kicks in, Jane jumps up from her chair as if the Archbishop of Canterbury had just waltzed in. “Fuck,” she blurts—while fervently praying that she would never actually say _fuck_ in front of the archbishop.

Wearily amused, Catherine tucks the cap under her arm. “You know, Reverend, I’m pretty accustomed to getting that kind of reaction from the general public, but I’ve got to say it’s a first from a member of the clergy.” She takes in Jasmine, who gapes at her. “Received a call from the resident doctor on duty here, concerning—”

Later, Jane will berate herself violently for being so utterly awestruck at Catherine’s appearance that Jasmine’s panicked reaction did not fully register. But now the girl also bolts out of her chair, winces in pain, and spills the paper cup of tea all over the industrial gray carpet underneath them.

“No.” Jasmine swipes angrily at the tea stain on her jeans. “Fuck it, I’m out.”

“Hey, Jasmine.” Jane reaches out; her fingertips brush the girl’s sleeve. “Wait. Just hang on.”

“ _I said no fucking coppers. I said that to you._ ” Her shout rings through the near-empty atrium. The nurse flicks a hooded, vaguely threatening gaze at them; the others scattered about the atrium are bored—just another night of shouting and scenes at hospital.

As Catherine takes a step toward the girl, Jane turns, blocks her—the heel of her upraised hand almost bumps into Catherine’s neon-covered sternum. “Can you just back off and not act like a cop for a minute? Give us a moment?”

Any other police officer, Jane assumes, would now handcuff and toss her in the back of a cruiser. And she highly doubts that David’s waning political influence stretches this far north, so the option of a panicky late-night phone call asking him to finagle her release from a jail cell would not be a viable one.

Catherine stares at the hand resting so precariously close to her chest and, when the hand is quickly retracted, charitably opts to ignore both the transgression and the mouthy little priest. She tilts her head and calls out for the girl: “Jasmine.”

Primed to do a runner, Jasmine hesitates; perhaps witnessing Catherine act in a definitively non-copper fashion prompts her to extend forth a scrap of trust.

“Look, love, I’m not here to arrest you, not here to cause you any trouble or worry. Now, you could just tell me nothing’s happened and I’ll go on about my evening.” Catherine pauses. “But that doesn’t look like what’s going on. Does it? Nothing’s going to happen that you don’t want to happen, I promise. I see you’re in good hands here with the reverend but—”

Jasmine glares accusatorily at Jane. “You’re a _priest_?” she screeches.

Jane can only tiredly confess via nodding. This really isn’t my fucking night, she thinks.

“Okay, Jasmine, I gather you think that the clergy are pillocks—” Catherine begins.

 _What the fuck?_ Jane scrunches her face with a sneer. Well, if she has to be the one thrown under the bus to get this girl the help she needs, fine.

“I get it, I do. But putting that aside, you really are in good hands—”

_Gee, thanks, Catherine._

“—and I’m here to help too. If you want to talk—off the record, that’s fine, we can do that. Or not. Or if you need someplace safe—”

“We’ve got that taken care of,” Jane interrupts.

Jasmine shakes her head, turns to go once more, and as a rather unaffectionate goodbye bellows _fuck off_ at them both.

Unsurprisingly, this does not deter Catherine. “Was he a police officer? The man who did this to you?” She says it loud enough to carry, authoritative enough to stop Jasmine dead.

The girl won’t look at them. “I can’t tell you.”

Catherine sighs. “You’ve already told me, love.”

Jasmine angrily grinds out the denial again: “ _I can’t tell you._ ”

“All right,” Catherine replies quickly. “How about I give you my number—”

To Jane’s enormous relief, her mobile pings. It’s Jasmine’s ride from the agency, confirming they are outside; indeed, when Jane glances up from the phone she sees the boxy, silver Citigo with the correct license plate described to her earlier via text, parked and waiting outside the hospital’s main entrance and with two women sitting in front.

“Jasmine. They’re here.” Jane pockets the mobile. “Are you—?”

The girl, who has already seen the car outside, rushes to the exit, where the automatic doors barely open in time to let her through, all while Jane worries that she’s moving faster than anyone with a broken rib ought to. Outside, the woman on the passenger side of the vehicle gets out to greet Jasmine. They talk, Jasmine nods, and gets in the front.

Before getting back in the car, the woman outside peers in through the glass wall and sees them. She smiles broadly and waves frantically—at Catherine, who returns both the grin and the greeting.

“You know them,” Jane says flatly. Of course she does. _Catherine knows everybody, knows what they’re doing, knows if they’re bad or good,_ Myra had said. _She’s like Santa Claus—instead of gifts, though, she gives you all sorts of hell._

“I know one of them. Karen Phelps.” Catherine nods at the departing car. “Used to be on the force. We trained together. She works for that group now.” She releases a small, satisfied sigh. “She’s good. Smart, proactive. Good instincts. Easy for me to follow up with.” The awkward reality of being alone with the stroppy pillock vicar now settles in, and Catherine gazes so intently at her shoes that one would assume she’s at a Slowdive concert. “Didn’t know you volunteered for them.”

Jane stares out into pitch black, the firmament of heaven snatched out from underneath her. “Yeah.” A familiar wave of futility—usually a chaser to bouts of insomnia at three or four in the morning—hits her, and in full immersion of this misery she is unaware of Catherine long enough to berate herself aloud. “Sometimes,” she sighs, “I feel as useless as tits on a bull.”

Catherine’s loud, robust laugh is no less pleasing because of its unexpectedness and it spite of it all—the dark hour, the brutalized girl, and sensing herself a source of mockery to this ultra-competent woman—Jane’s mouth twitches into a reluctant grin.

“You know, you really don’t talk like any bloody priest I’ve ever encountered,” Catherine says. Her tone of wonderment shades the statement toward admiration.

Or so Jane likes to think. “To my detriment, probably.”

“Aw, bless. Self-pity doesn’t suit you.” Catherine pulls on her cap, nods toward the doorway. “Let me give you a lift home.”

“I can walk.”

“You want to sulk. I get it. But it’s about half hour to yours by foot. You’d freeze your useless tits off and neither Clare nor God would forgive me it. Come on.” As Jane stands stock-still and struggles for some attempt at wit, some pithy comeback, Catherine is already striding through the yawning, hissing automatic doors; all she can do is follow, muttering _shit_ as the vigorous Yorkshire winter—always resurrecting itself over and over again like Lazarus—once again smacks her in the gob.

As a civilian it is strange, almost uncomfortable, to sit in the front seat of a police cruiser. Even if said vehicle smells of curry and cigarettes, and with a substantial bit of a fag crushed inside a paper cup, smote in a rush. After the AA meeting this week, Clare had boasted to Jane that both she and Catherine had finally, successfully weaned themselves off cigarettes altogether, and Jane finds it typical of Clare’s kindness that she gives her sister the benefit of the doubt. The car glides quietly through the night and as they pass unfamiliar dark roads lined with stone walls and parks and trees, she is now grateful she didn’t have to walk home, because she hasn’t the faintest idea where they are. After the pounding music of the club and the thick tension and shouting at the hospital, the silence—an amiable one, Jane assumes—between them is welcome. Unlike her garrulous sister, Catherine apparently does not excel at small talk; any conversation will be on her terms and hers alone.

Still, Jane’s middle-class politesse cannot be denied. “Do you often work this late?”

“Nope. We’re short tonight, had to cover for someone.”

Roughly they barrel through some ancient, darkly malevolent cobbled alley. Jane entertains the paranoid fear that Catherine has ill intent and that she’ll end up handcuffed and tossed into one of the huge dumpsters they pass; then realizes—hopes—it’s probably some kind of shortcut.  

Grudgingly, Catherine keeps the conversation going. “I didn’t know you were working with Karen’s group.”

“Thought you knew everything about me.” Also during their post-AA chat, Clare had let slip that not only did she know about Linh, she knew about the murder investigation Linh had been caught up in. Which led to the confession that Catherine had, as Clare diplomatically put it, “sort of looked you up.” It is a really good thing Clare has stopped drinking, Jane thought at the time; God knows what all is bottled up inside her and what secrets and thoughts and resentments, when mixed with the potency of whiskey or gin, might come flooding forth.

While Jane questions the legality of a police officer Sort of Looking Someone Up for no bloody good reason, the wise-ass comment gets a flinty glare from Catherine that is enhanced in a shade of cool blue fury courtesy of the panoply of dashboard lights.

Nervously Jane drums her knee and switches course. “I’m sorry about earlier,” she says. “Telling you to, ah, back off like that—I just didn’t want to spook her.”

“It’s all right,” Catherine replies crisply. “I understand the circumstances and the reaction.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“But if you’d been a bloke you would’ve lost hand that hand.”

“Right.”

“Were you out and about when they contacted you?” Catherine glances at her, gauges Jane’s reaction—shifting nervously in her seat—and adds: “No dog collar tonight, and that jacket—”

“It’s not a crime to wear a leather jacket,” Jane mumbles defensively.

“Just curious.”

She does not fall for the neutral feint.

And so the next question drops: “Were you at Bastille?”

“What?”

Catherine verbally floors it from zero to a hundred. “Leather club—BDSM for all, young, old, gay, straight, what have you. Huge old building down near the wharf, Savile Road. I remember when it was a biscuit factory, went out of business in the 90s, became a squat for a while with parties, raves, all sorts of goings on, can’t tell you how many times I was called in for someone ODing there, so it’s almost a blessing now that it’s a space for hedge fund managers to get tied up in gyno chairs and have God knows what shoved up their arses. Few weeks ago I was called down there a for a drunk and disorderly and we found a town councilman on the premises, two lads in leather harnesses about to truss him up, he thought I was there to arrest _him_ so he threw his ball gag at me, hit me right in the head with it too—I washed up about three times when I got home—anyway, ended up cuffing him then and there and took him in and d’ya know what?”

Smiling, Jane only hums a prompt for her to continue.

“ _He enjoyed it._ Said, ‘you’d make a great dominatrix’ and I said, ‘yeah, I’ll keep that in mind for retirement, thanks.’ Anyway, no offense if you’re into all that, although I reckon you’re not, since you don’t know about the place.”

“Um. Yeah. Not really my scene.”

“Good. Because you’d be a prime blackmailing target.”

“True.” Jane admits it absently. While appreciating Catherine’s shift from cagey, squinty-eyed copper to impromptu raconteur, she wonders if the story is mere entertainment value, a rapprochement of sorts, or just to shut up the bloody vicar in her car who will otherwise keep pestering her with dumb questions. At any rate Catherine seems more relaxed now, so now Jane risks a question that may provoke a sarcastic retort rather than a tale of Yorkshire sex dens. “How did you know about Jasmine—that the abuser was law enforcement?”

“I didn’t. Unlucky guess.” Catherine pauses. “She seemed more frightened by the uniform than most. Police who beat their wives, their girlfriends, their kids—it’s not uncommon. And if I find out who it is—” At an intersection the cruiser takes a broad turn onto a narrow street and headlamps from the cross traffic temporarily blinds Jane to everything but the white hot illumination of night inside the car as Catherine, undeterred by the flash, undeterred by seemingly everything, squints with the straight-ahead stoicism of a sailor in a storm.

Finally, the streets start to look familiar. Jane recognizes the launderette on the next street over from hers, also home to the teashop where they laughed at her for asking if they had white tea and the pharmacy where the teenaged boy behind the counter had the vapors when confronted with a vicar buying tampons. One final turn and they are in front of the house that—in spite of the fact that she lives here now and also thanks to Clare—she can only think of as _Old Man Willoughby’s House._ The dead winter yard looks even more forlorn and hopeless at night; she really can’t wait for Clare to have a go at it.

“Here you are.” Catherine’s weary, useless announcement is that of someone well accustomed to giving rides to victims and vicars, drunkards and witnesses.

“Thank you.” Jane hesitates as a frisson of something—of what, she is unsure—passes between them, perhaps nothing more than a one-sided regret that the night has come to an end. She realizes she has enjoyed talking with Catherine—rather, finding herself the privileged audience for Catherine’s monologues and opinions—and for a thousandth of a second entertains the notion of asking her in for a nightcap of tea. Even though Catherine is on duty until God knows when.

Shadows and streetlights render Catherine with subtle, compelling seriousness beyond the mere reach of daytime, she regards Jane with careful, steady expectancy. God the trickster again. When She shows you this side of Her, She reveals the truth embroidered in jest, the rare beauty swanning its way through a lake of the commonplace.

Catherine’s expression softly mutates from weariness to concern. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Jane replies quickly. She jerks the door handle not once but three times before the sticky door finally gives way. “Thanks again for the ride.”

“If you’re worried about Jasmine,” Catherine adds, “she’ll be well taken care of. They’re good people there.”

“Oh. I’m not worried, I, um, did my research on the organization before I contacted them—” Before she can start chattering full on like a numpty— _what is wrong with you?_ —she slides out of the car and once again gets bitch-slapped by the cold.  

“Right, then,” Catherine says. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” Jane leans down into the open doorway. “Oh, and by the way—”

“Yeah?”

Imbued with the spirit of God the trickster, she grins. “I won’t tell Clare you’re smoking again.”


End file.
